A Night in the Lonesome October

Novel, Speculative fiction by Roger Zelazny

Blurb

A Night in the Lonesome October is a semi-satirical, though not comic, novel by Roger Zelazny published in 1993, near the end of his life. It was his last book, and one of his five personal favorites.
The book is divided in 32 chapters, each representing one "night" in the month of October. The story is told in the first-person, akin to journal entries. Throughout, 33 full-page illustrations by Gahan Wilson punctuate a tale heavily influenced by H. P. Lovecraft. The title is a line from Edgar Allan Poe's "Ulalume" and Zelazny thanks him as well as others – Mary Shelley, Bram Stoker, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, Robert Bloch and Albert Payson Terhune – whose most famous characters appear in the book.
A Night in the Lonesome October was nominated for the Nebula Award for Best Novel in 1994. A similar theme of conflict surrounding the opening of a gate to another world exists in Zelazny's novel Madwand.

First Published

1993

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